A tale of two Teddys

1. ASCENT TO THE SENATE: In 1962, the year he turned 30, Edward M. Kennedy, the youngest Kennedy brother, was elected to the Massachusetts Senate seat vacated by his brother John, who had recently moved on to the White House.

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2. TEDDY TAKES UP THE TORCH: In 1964, Kennedy made his first Senate speech, in which he spoke in support of the Civil Rights Act that President Kennedy had proposed before his nation-shaking assassination. The landmark bill, which outlawed segregation of public accommodations, was signed later that year, effectively ending the Jim Crow era and kicking off a lifelong litany of Kennedy-led anti-discrimination legislation ranging from the Immigration Act of 1965 to the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

3. OFF TO A GOOD ‘START’: As a champion of the Head Start program in 1964, Kennedy was instrumental in combating hunger and improving educational opportunities for poor children. He would continue to advance those twin passions repeatedly over the ensuing decades, taking a leadership role on bills including everything from 1972’s WIC supplemental nutrition program to 2001’s No Child Left Behind Act.

4. STIRRING SENDOFF: After the assassination of his brother Bobby in 1968, Kennedy delivered a memorably moving eulogy at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. In the speech, which helped ennoble the youngest Kennedy in the public mind, he famously counseled, “My brother need not be idealized or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life, to be remembered as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.”

5. ON THE RISE: In 1969, Kennedy was elected Senate majority whip at the age of 36.

6. HEALTH CARE HISTORY: After supporting the passage of Medicare and Medicaid laws in 1965, in 1969 Kennedy took up in earnest what he recently called “the cause of my life,” giving his first speech calling for national health insurance for all: “We must begin to move now to establish a comprehensive national health insurance program, capable of bringing the same amount and high quality of health care to every man, woman, and child in the United States,” he said. In the following decades, he would play a leading role in advocating universal health care, in the passage of landmark health legislation including the COBRA health-insurance portability law, the S-CHIP children’s health insurance program, the HIPAA health insurance portability and accountability act, and the Ryan White CARE Act, as well as laws supporting cancer prevention, the development of drugs to treat rare diseases and countless other health-related reforms.